Breaking deals, Apple sued over missing Breaking Bad episodes

Seeing as Breaking Bad is all about an ordinary law-abiding guy forced by an untenable situation to travel to the dark side and start living (and succeeding) in the criminal underworld, you’d think most people would be wary of annoying the show’s most ardent fans. Wouldn’t want them to see them get disgruntled, now would we? They may get ideas.

Well, one man in Ohio in the US is very disgruntled. But, thankfully, he has refrained from setting up his own meth lab, in favour of filing a class action lawsuit against Apple. Cleveland doctor, Noam Lazebnik claims that the Cupertino tech company is to blame for him only getting half a season of the multi-award-winning Sony Pictures Television crime drama.

As reported in gigaom.com, Lazebnik believes Apple owes him and other Breaking Bad fans US$22.99 (or US$14.99 for standard, as opposed to high, definition) for not including all 16 episodes in a season pass to the show’s fifth and supposedly final season. “When a consumer buys a ticket to a football game, he does not have to leave at halftime. When a consumer buys an opera ticket, he does not get kicked out at intermission,” says the claim. The claim also notes that the show, which stars Bryan Cranston as a high school chemistry teacher who starts a meth empire, is the most popular show in Apple’s iTunes’ store.

The fifth season has been broken up into two parts, but there is much dispute among both viewers and distributors over whether that makes it season five and season six, or just season five, with an extended break in the middle. If it’s the latter, then the lawsuit argues that customers are being swindled by paying for a season pass to the entire season, and only receiving half of that season.

The other argument seems to go along the lines of: even if fans are being cheated, should Apple be the target of their wrath? Or is original channel AMC the real culprit? As one forum commenter pointed out on the macdailynews website, “If you buy a faulty car with an exploding petrol tank, do you sue the manufacturer or the car dealer?”